Sartre

Sartre took existentialism out of theology and into the streets. By the late 1940s he was a celebrity philosopher — café debates, political pamphlets, the lecture "Existentialism Is a Humanism" that he later half-disowned. The Nobel committee gave him the Prize in 1964; he refused it.

The big idea: existence precedes essence. There's no human nature waiting to be uncovered, no divine plan we're filling out. We exist first; then, through choices, we make ourselves into something. This sounds liberating until you notice the burden — you can't blame your essence for what you do, because you don't have one. The famous formulation: we are condemned to be free.

*Being and Nothingness* (1943) is the dense phenomenological treatise: consciousness as nothingness, the look of the Other, bad faith (the lie we tell ourselves to escape our freedom — the waiter who plays at being a waiter to avoid being a person who is choosing to wait tables). The later *Critique of Dialectical Reason* tries to reconcile existentialism with Marxism — Sartre's lifelong political commitment.

The novels and plays — *Nausea*, *No Exit*, *The Roads to Freedom* — carry the same philosophy in human-scale form. "Hell is other people" is a line from *No Exit*, not a complaint about strangers but a claim about how the gaze of others objectifies us. Simone de Beauvoir was his lifelong partner and intellectual equal; her *The Second Sex* (1949) extends and corrects existentialist phenomenology toward feminism.